After a days of teasing fans that she’d show off her September Vogue cover — her second appearance on the front of the mag — with such endearing tweets as “Don’t worry I’ve been txting Wintour all morning trying to get that cover queens. next im sending bagels to VOGUE (complex carbohydrate war),” Gaga finally posted the image and an inside photo, by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, on her LittleMonsters.com site at midnight. “SHH DONT TELL TWITTER/ SEPT ISSUE OF VOGUE MAGAZINE/ Sorry Anna but the underground kids deserve it. bisous!” she wrote on her social networking site, but somehow we think she wasn’t exactly going against the editrix’s wishes by sharing this sneak peek, especially since the time stamp on the same images on Vogue.com read 11:01 p.m. Technicalities. Anyway, while Gaga joked on LittleMonsters and Twitter that she was either channeling “fozzibear” or Ru Paul, with her giant blond cloud of hair and hip-hugging magenta Marc Jacobs gown, we think she looks like a fierce grand dame of fashion. (And OK, we know she’s probably talking about her friend’s dog Fozzibear, but we prefer to imagine a Muppet rivalry going on between her old VMA date Kermit and the piano-playing comic dog.) It somehow gives her the air of an older diva who owns the world. The inside pic, by contrast, in which she’s wearing nothing but a fuzzy magenta Steven Jones hat, shows Gaga looking very young and innocent, like a young maiden in a Renaissance portrait.
The cover line teases that we’ll learn something we don’t yet know about the Mother Monster. And yet the quotes on the site seem very characteristic of the Gaga we know and love: “I don’t really make records for people to listen to and go, ‘Wow, she’s a genius,’ ” she tells interviewer Jonathan Van Meter. “I’d really like you to order a drink, maybe kiss the person you came with that evening, or rediscover something about your past that makes you feel even more brave.”